By Mike Huckabee
July 26, 2023
|
|
|
|
BY MIKE HUCKABEE
Blessings on you and your family from all the Huckabee team! Thank you for subscribing!
Sincerely,
Mike
DAILY BIBLE VERSE
Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost:
Matthew 28:19
A Safari into Deep Blue America
As you know, I actually welcome discussions and Q&A’s with people of different views (what an archaic concept!). So I recently took a safari deep into the hostile blue territory of New York to be a rare conservative speaker at the Chautauqua Institution’s lecture series. Here’s a report on that appearance, complete with my comments on a range of issues, including whether Trump should join the GOP debates, whether Biden should be impeached, and whether my daughter Sarah will run for President.
Related: Seven GOP candidates appear to have qualified for the first RNC debate on August 23rd. Whether Trump will actually show up is still an open question.
https://www.axios.com/2023/07/25/2024-republican-debates-qualify-gop
The wheels of justice
The wheels of justice may turn slowly, but they finally arrived at the correct destination in Moscow, Idaho. The city has agreed to pay a $300,000 settlement to three people who were arrested in September of 2020 for not wearing facemasks at an OUTDOOR church service. The cops yanked their hymn books right out of their hands and hauled them away in handcuffs, in clear violation of their First and Fourth Amendment rights.
Moscow is known as a liberal college town in a red state, and plaintiff Gabriel Rench said the mayor was breaking all the social distancing rules while having churchgoers arrested. Rench called it a microcosm of what was happening nationwide: "Liberalism is really turning into kind of a modern-day cult. They use coercion, they want power, and they have no real moral standard..." Rench said city officials have refused to meet with him because “They don't really want to have real conversations, but that's just liberalism 2.0 and cancel culture for sure.”
Maybe having to cough up 300 grand will make them think about canceling their totalitarian ways.
This story will enrage you
This story about a former Canadian school principal who was branded a “white supremacist” for disagreeing with a radical black female “anti-racism instructor” and then hounded into unemployment and suicide should enrage anyone who believes in freedom of thought and speech and rightly despises slander and bullying. Our sympathies to Mr. Bilkszto’s family, and I hope they sue for 10 times the damages of his original lawsuit.
I also wanted to call attention to this reader comment on the story, which makes a great point about the twisted priorities of so many leftist officials and corporate executives:
“The Toronto District School Board is probably the most left leaning anti-white woke school board in Canada. They don’t have enough money to give all students books or pay for breakfast and lunches for poorer families, but they have an unending amount to spend on these racist indoctrination programs.”
What President Trump is facing…
If you’d like to see what former President Trump is up against when he’s facing all these indictments by rogue prosecutors both in Biden’s DOJ and in deep blue pockets of America, then read this essay from the Karlstack Substack account. It examines in detail the federal prosecution of Douglass Mackey, the young man who was charged with “election interference” by Biden’s DOJ and convicted by a New York jury, and who could be facing years in prison for the heinous crime of…sharing humorous memes about Hillary Clinton on Twitter (sure, Hillary; THAT’S why you lost.)
The DOJ claims this is a crime because joke memes telling Democrats to vote by text or on Wednesday, etc., amount to attempts at election interference since some people might actually believe them. Well, I guess they know the intelligence levels of their voters better than I do.
https://www.karlstack.com/p/twitter-poster-railroaded-for-free
Read it and be shocked and infuriated at the looooong list of acts of prosecutorial and judicial misconduct that it took to convict and railroad Mackey into prison on circumstantial evidence of conspiring with people he never talked with to allegedly alter the results of a national election by posting some humorous memes on social media that he didn’t even create. It aptly describes his trial as a “totalitarian nightmare.” If for no other reason, read it to learn the jaw-dropping justification they cited for holding the trial in the deeply biased Eastern District of New York, even though that area had nothing to do with the alleged “crime.”
As the author makes clear, this is a (so-far successful) attempt to expand the government’s power to police speech on public forums and to prosecute and even imprison Americans for exercising their First Amendment rights. Let us all hope and pray that the appeals court sees this for the Orwellian power grab it is and slaps it down hard.
Most "2023" Headline Of The Day!
Trending Politics considered it worthy of the title of “Breaking News” to announce that contestants in the Miss Italy Pageant “must be a woman from birth.”
Here in the US, half of liberals will be outraged by that restriction and the other half will be stumped by what the word “woman” means.
Attention: Support the newsletter
We are 176 paid subscribers away from reaching our July subscriber recruitment goal for my politics newsletter.
Big Tech, such as Facebook and Google, are making it harder for Republican opinions to reach voters . So today I would like you to consider subscribing to the paid version of my Substack newsletter.
A Substack subscription-based newsletter allows my team and I to focus on what matters: the writing and the research we do to back up the writing, instead of worrying about what Google is saying about me, how they are handling advertising on our website or whether or not my work shows up when you search for it.
Subscribe to The Morning Edition (substack.com)
Please help us reach our new subscriber goal! We want to keep our newsletter going!
Worth mentioning
I mentioned this yesterday, but it’s worth mentioning again:
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/biden-admin-crackdown-water-heaters-2029-targets-home-appliances
Water heaters have now joined air conditioners, gas stoves, clothes washers, gas-powered cars and who knows what else on the growing list of appliances and equipment that the Biden Administration is regulating out of financial reach for the average American. In a perfect example of the “I’m from Washington and I’m here to help you” mentality, they insist that all the new regulations to make everything more “efficient” will save consumers money over the long run. But they’re forcing lower cost products off the market and making everything entirely unaffordable in the near term.
Say, here’s a crazy thought: why not let the free market offer the high-end appliances for those who want and can afford them, and less expensive alternatives for everybody else? You know, not everyone has millions of dollars in influence-peddling income.
Agreement reached
The Teamsters Union and UPS announced that they’ve reached tentative agreement on a new five-year contract, averting a potentially crippling strike by 340,000 UPS workers.
https://www.breitbart.com/news/ups-strike-averted-as-deal-reached-with-teamsters-union/
You’d think this would be the lead story on every newscast, considering how dependent we’ve become on UPS delivery from Amazon, eBay and countless other online outlets. As Stewie Griffin once observed on “Family Guy,” that’s what America is now: just people driving boxes back and forth.
MIKE HUCKABEE'S PRAYER TREE: Sign up here.
Is there an issue here?
This week, several young, famous, seemingly very healthy people have been hospitalized with blood clots, which has again ignited the clash between those who blame COVID vaccines and those who not only deny that but try to silence any discussion of it. These cases have become frequent enough that it’s become like the donkey in the living room that everyone’s trying to avoid mentioning.
David Strom at HotAir.com has an excellent article about this that I think strikes just the right tone.
https://hotair.com/david-strom/2023/07/25/everybody-seems-to-be-getting-blood-clots-n567032
Strom addresses the issue of whether these incidents are really more common than before or whether this is just confirmation bias, and the responses from health experts. To answer that question requires an open, objective study, but anyone who suggests such a thing is branded a crazy conspiracy theorist (like the people who think child sex trafficking exists?) He also makes the perfectly fair point that these so-called health experts have either been wrong or lying to our faces a lot lately, so telling us “shut up and take our word for it” is no longer good enough.
Video Link:
This is a livestream link to Hunter Biden’s court appearance today involving his sweetheart plea deal. At this writing, it’s yet to start. Let’s hope the judge is angry enough about the obvious favoritism and Hunter’s lawyers allegedly lying to her to suppress evidence that she rejects the deal. Some things shouldn’t be tolerated, even in a Delaware court when your name is Biden.
https://www.foxnews.com/video/6331866291112
In another breaking legal story, a jury in London found actor Kevin Spacey not guilty in his criminal sexual assault trial involving four men. I’ll leave the details to the linked story, if you want to read them.
https://www.foxnews.com/entertainment/verdict-reached-kevin-spacey-sexual-assault-trial
Hooray
As much bad news as I have to report, I’m always on the lookout for some good news. So this is wonderful: President Biden announced that he has “ended cancer as we know it.” Hooray!
https://www.westernjournal.com/bidens-mind-gone-now-says-ended-cancer-know/
Democrat lawyers: Is there ANYTHING they won’t do?
Ahead of Hunter Biden’s scheduled plea deal on Wednesday, breaking news Tuesday suggested his legal defense is dripping with such corruption, it rivals that of any Biden-Burisma bribery scheme. How appropriate that these dirtied-up lawyers would be defending Hunter Biden.
It seemed everything was going smoothly for the team led by Chris Clark, formerly of Democrat powerhouse law firm Latham & Watkins, with a slap-on-the-wrist plea agreement for Hunter that would be hurried through on Wednesday even as more information was coming out about the case. Amazingly, the deal would get in under the wire before the testimony of former Hunter business partner Devon Archer, which was put off three times and is now scheduled for next Monday. Fortunately, some revelations on Tuesday threw a wrench into the works.
Tuesday evening, the NEW YORK POST reported that Hunter’s attorneys had been accused of a very dirty trick. The House Ways & Means Committee, chaired by Jason Smith of Missouri, had filed an amicus brief that day, ahead of the sentencing, to Delaware District Judge Maryellen Noreika. It contained evidence the Hunter team wanted to see blocked, so they apparently used this false representation with the judge to try to get that done.
The at-issue Ways & Means filing had included 448 pages of testimony from the two IRS whistleblowers who testified last week before the House Oversight Committee, rightly noting that Hunter had benefited from “political interference which calls into question the propriety of the investigation.” The Hunter team did not want THAT going before the judge, so a woman named Jessica Bengels, who works as director of litigation services for Latham & Watkins but who allegedly represented herself as working with Theodore Kittila, an attorney for the House Ways & Means Committee (!!!), contacted the court and asked that this new Ways & Means filing be removed from the docket.
It actually was removed, and when Ways & Means got back in touch, the court clerk told them they’d have to re-file --- which, of course, they did, including email exchanges with the court about what had happened and also with Hunter’s attorneys. We thought those would no doubt make entertaining reading, and it turns out that they are, as seen in excerpts published by TOWNHALL.
A sample: When Kittila confronted Hunter’s legal team about this, they pretended to tear out their hair about Ways & Means’ filing containing “confidential tax and identifying information,” even though this has been public in the form of whistleblower testimony for over a month. Chris Clark tried his usual aggressive stance, saying, “As far as I am aware, the clerk took the filing down on their own accord. Your attempts to publicly file my client’s personal financial information with no protection are improper, illegal and in violation of applicable rules...we will seek all appropriate sanctions in response to your actions.” Ah, so Hunter’s attorneys wanted THEM sanctioned.
Kittila’s reply: “You should probably take a step back from your statements. The clerk’s office advised that it was represented to her that the request was being made by my firm. We will be advising Judge Norieka of this improper conduct.”
Clark wrote back that he stood by all his statements “and I hope you have an affidavit from the court in support of yours.” (As you’ll see below, Kittila did have one, from the court clerk.)
The U.K. DAILY MAIL broke the news that the Hunter legal team faces sanctions over this stunt. One would think that lying to the court clerk on the eve of a client’s plea deal is very serious indeed. (One would think it would show us what a lawyer has to do to get disbarred.) Judge Noreika told Hunter’s attorneys to explain themselves by 9PM Tuesday night or be sanctioned.
And so they did, just before the deadline, telling the judge that, gee, it was all a misunderstanding.
“The matter under consideration appears to stem from an unfortunate and unintentional miscommunication between a staff member at our firm and employees of the Court,” attorney Matthew Salerno wrote. “We have no idea how the misunderstanding occurred, but our understanding is that there was no misrepresentation.”
He blamed the misunderstanding on the phone number for Jessica Bengels, which, he said, should have shown up as “LATHAM” on the clerk’s caller ID. He attached an affidavit from Bengels, attempting to explain how this happened (even though he’d just said he had no idea how it occurred). But Kittila, writing for Ways & Means, provided a copy of an email from the Delaware court clerk, Samantha Grimes, that backed up the claim of false identity. “She [Jessica Bengels] said she worked with Theodore Kittila and it was important the document was removed immediately,” Grimes had written.
The time stamps on the emails show that the request from Bengels to remove it was made after Kittila had refused the Hunter team’s request to file the testimony under seal.
“Something crazy is happening right now in the Hunter Biden case,” said Mike Howell, director of the Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project. “The judge ordered the sealing of transcripts that have been publicly available on the House website for over a month and which a House Committee voted to release in compliance with applicable rules...It is unbelievable that we are dealing with these 11th-hour procedural shenanigans that reek of desperation.”
It’s true --- as the NEW YORK POST stated, Judge Noreika did order the filing sealed until the close of business Wednesday. Here’s their report, which may have been updated since.
https://nypost.com/2023/07/25/hunter-biden-lawyer-accused-of-deception-to-seal-damning-evidence/
……….
RELATED: And now, it gets even worse. The WASHINGTON EXAMINER broke the story that when U.S. Attorney David Weiss started his investigation into Hunter’s finances, a very close Biden political aide was working on the team. Alexander Mackler goes way back to Joe Biden’s Senate days, when he served as his press secretary. When Joe became VP, Mackler served as his legal counsel. He also ran the successful Delaware attorney general’s race for Joe’s late son Beau in 2010. When Joe was elected President in 2020, Mackler was “helping,” the EXAMINER said, “the Biden administration create the blueprint for his ‘Justice’ Department." Uh-oh.
Emails from Hunter’s laptop show Mackler also was close with Hunter Biden, during the time he was already working at the Delaware office. He referred to Hunter fondly as “brother.”
Unbelievably, this guy was on the team “investigating” Hunter Biden. And Weiss’ assistant Lesley Wolf, whom the whistleblowers allege put up roadblocks to their investigation, worked alongside Mackler and prosecuted a major case with him.
So this is something else Judge Noreika needs to look at before she approves that plea deal. More at the link...
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/house/close-biden-political-aide-weiss-hunter
Here’s TOWNHALL’s take…
The DAILY MAIL has a report, too, noting that since May 2019, Mackler has been Chief Deputy Attorney General in the Delaware State Department of Justice. Wolf has continued to work on the Hunter Biden case. Much more detail here...
Last week, the DAILY MAIL reported that Assistant U.S. Attorney Derek Hines, who signed off on that “sweetheart” tax deal for Hunter, formerly worked as a special counsel to former FBI Director Louis Freeh, who partnered with Hunter on a $3 million consulting job in Romania. This is just one more reason Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson has called into question the integrity of the Hunter probe. On the contrary, it seems like business as usual in Delaware, which is looking more and more like “little Romania.”
……..
HUNTER “ART” UPDATE: Yesterday, we brought you the story of Elizabeth Hirsh Naftali, who is reported to be one of the “anonymous” buyers of Hunter’s “art” and was appointed by President Biden to be on the Commission for the Preservation of America’s Heritage Abroad. Now, BREITBART reports that this big Democrat donor visited the White House 13 times in December 2021, the month after Hunter first showcased his paintings at his art dealer’s gallery in New York City. I’m sure the subject of her interest in Hunter’s paintings never came up.
Actually, BUSINESS INSIDER confirmed with three sources that Hunter knew she had bought the painting. BREITBART goes on to describe how the art world, by not being subject to the Bank Secrecy Act, facilitates international money laundering. Highly recommended reading…
Finally, don’t miss Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley’s speech on the Senate floor Tuesday, as he was on fire. At least watch the first minute, in which he says the redactions the FBI made to that unclassified “1023” were “obstructive conduct by the United States.” REDSTATE takes you through the speech point by point.
“Popular Constitutionalism”
I have lots of occasions in this newsletter to cite George Orwell’s famous quote that there are some ideas so absurd that only an intellectual could believe them. That’s especially handy when covering stories out of our wack-a-doodle leftist university faculties, like the two alleged “academics” who just wrote an open letter urging President Biden to simply ignore any Supreme Court rulings he doesn’t like. They call this “Popular Constitutionalism,” although using the Constitution as toilet paper isn’t very popular in my house. It’s also the legal theory cited by segregationists in the 1960s.
Stories like this often prompt the question, “Why do people who have elite college degrees and claim to be very intelligent constantly fall for transparent nonsense?” That’s the premise of this interesting article by Laura Dodsworth at the Brownstone Institute, “Why are intelligent people so easily tricked?” I suspect the first mistake some of these people made was getting tricked into believing they were all that intelligent in the first place.
https://brownstone.org/articles/why-are-intelligent-people-so-easily-tricked/
I JUST WANTED TO SAY:
Thank you for reading my newsletter.
For more news, visit my website.
Permalink: https://www.mikehuckabee.com/2023/7/huckabee-post
Leave a Comment
Note: Fields marked with an * are required.